Many 'refugees' taking advantage of system

It astonishes me how much misinformation about Syrian refugees is being presented as news in print, radio and television.

First, refugees are officially defined as people who have a "well-founded fear of persecution," but being caught in Syria's civil war, while obviously hazardous, isn't persecution. So such people aren't actually refugees.

Second, most of them aren't Syrians, either. As The Wall Street Journal reported ("Migrants Pose as Syrians to Open Door to Asylum in Europe," Sept. 12), there's a brisk trade in stolen and counterfeit Syrian passports.

As few as 10 percent of this human tsunami may be Syrians; some come from as far afield as Afghanistan. Further, if these were predominantly people fleeing a war zone, they wouldn't be 69 percent men (primarily men in their 20s), as reported by the UN Refugee Agency.

Instead, most of these people are simply illegal immigrants from all over the Mideast and Africa who are using the chaos in Syria as cover to exit their own dysfunctional countries and move to the gravy-train welfare states of Western civilization.

And what about those background checks? Well, the FBI admitted to Congress that it can't confirm identities or investigate histories of most people arriving from the strife-torn Mideast.

For an explosive example of what this means, recall Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Chechen "refugees" who bombed the Boston Marathon.

Among the religious minorities in the Islamic lands that do have a "well-founded fear of persecution," are Christians, and Yazidis. Before we accept 'Muslim refugees' we need to allow the religious minorities that survived the Holocaust being waged by violent Islamic forces to find safety in our land first.

So Europe should decline these faux refugees. The U.S. should too.

William Christian

Elk Grove Village